Hot Ice Planets!

Pete

Pete
I don't know what the hottest Ice Planet anyone has found has been, I started thinking about it after I found this planet:

16418288700_0cef46623f_z.jpg


At first I thought the only way it could remain ice at 474K would be due to the exceptionally high pressure of the planet, 5,000 atmospheres.
But I ran the calculation, and found that 5,000 atmospheres is "only" around 500 Mpa...

From the phase diagram for water (thanks Wikipedia!) I see that under this pressure, it is not even enough to form Ice VI, which would still have a melting point of only 355K (at the given pressure, it would likely have formed Ice V which is interesting stuff but not up to handling very high temperature):

512px-Phase_diagram_of_water.svg.png


I guess maybe the planet had a higher pressure atmosphere in the past, but it would have needed to be in excess of 3 GPa - which is almost 30,000 atmospheres to create Ice VII which would be enough to survive as Ice in the 474K of the planet...and that's a lot of pressure!!

Of course, maybe the composite of water, rock, and metal has helped somewhat, but the discrepancy against the given temperature and pressure is a lot to overcome.

On the other hand, maybe I'm over thinking this, and it is just a game... ;)

-- Pete.
 

Defacto

Defacto
On the topic of strange planets - Shouldn't planets with surface temperatures of several thousand degrees basically be glowing like small stars?

And also - tidal locked Earthlikes. This has been bothering me so much. Surely the environmental effects of tidal locking should be visible on an Earthlike?

For your ice world - what does it look like? Maybe the surface is liquid, and it gets colder/higher pressured (and more solid) further down. The composition would suggest that there's thousands of kilometers of ice below the surface. Maybe it's liquid for the first few kilometers, and then turns into Ice.

Edit: I made a very quick calculation, might be wrong:
You would need approximately 9 kilometers of water + the atmospheric pressure to reach enough pressure for solid H20 to form in this situation.
 
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Devil's Refugee

Devil's Refugee
Curse of the procedural engine. It'll spit out plenty variation but I suspect they weren't expecting players to pay attention to the detail behind it.
 

Pete

Pete
Defacto said:
On the topic of strange planets - Shouldn't planets with surface temperatures of several thousand degrees basically be glowing like small stars?
Click to expand...
Yup - although there are some molten planets that have some glow to them - one of the few planet types that look interesting from the "back".

For your ice world - what does it look like? Maybe the surface is liquid, and it gets colder/higher pressured (and more solid) further down. The composition would suggest that there's thousands of kilometers of ice below the surface. Maybe it's liquid for the first few kilometers, and then turns into Ice.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately I didn't think to screenshot the planet, but I am pretty sure it was a regular ice-world (I was really hoping for a water world in that spot!).

Edit: I made a very quick calculation, might be wrong:
You would need approximately 9 kilometers of water + the atmospheric pressure to reach enough pressure for solid H20 to form in this situation.
Click to expand...
...and under that situation, I'd rather call it a water-world and be done with it...I don't think many people are going to care initially what's 9Km under the surface. :)

-- Pete.
 

Defacto

Defacto
Well, I think water worlds have to sustain indigenous life to count as water worlds. It's not as easy as ''it's covered in water'', you have to have a water cycle with an organic part to it.
This world would be a lot harder (or even impossible) to terraform compared to the water worlds, and since it has such a large ice layer, mining is pretty much impossible, so I do think that this matters, at least to Universal Cartographics.
 

Cmdr Jezath

Cmdr Jezath
a lot of nitrogen on there also, at those pressures it would form liquid nitrogen no? which is blooomin cold? mmmm it also has water geysers and volcanism suggesting a hot active core..
 
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Pete

Pete
Defacto said:
Well, I think water worlds have to sustain indigenous life to count as water worlds. It's not as easy as ''it's covered in water'', you have to have a water cycle with an organic part to it.
This world would be a lot harder (or even impossible) to terraform compared to the water worlds, and since it has such a large ice layer, mining is pretty much impossible, so I do think that this matters, at least to Universal Cartographics.
Click to expand...
Very good points - but I think I have seen water worlds before that weren't tagged as candidates for terraforming, so I'm not sure if that's a criteria or not.

I'll certainly agree 100% that this planet isn't exactly somewhere to go on your summer holidays. :)

-- Pete.
 

Things

T
Speaking of weird planets, here's the least plausible one I've seen recently:

3L5dxmN.jpg


Rock/metal planet with surface temp of 11,196K ...
The star you see next to it is "just" 8,408K hot.
That atmospheric pressure isn't making things more reasonable, either.
 

Pete

Pete
Cmdr Jezath said:
a lot of nitrogen on there also, at those pressures it would form liquid nitrogen no?
Click to expand...
Nitrogen doesn't go liquid under those kind of pressures...well not exactly "normal" liquid - it becomes a supercritical fluid.

From that Wikipedia link:
Many pressurised gases are actually supercritical fluids. For example, nitrogen has a critical point of 126.2K (- 147 °C) and 3.4 MPa (34 bar). Therefore, nitrogen (or compressed air) in a gas cylinder above this pressure is actually a supercritical fluid. These are more often known as permanent gases. At room temperature, they are well above their critical temperature, and therefore behave as a gas, similar to CO2 at 400K above. However, they cannot be liquified by pressure unless cooled below their critical temperature.
Click to expand...

-- Pete.
 

Defacto

Defacto
Cmdr Jezath said:
a lot of nitrogen on there also, at those pressures it would form liquid nitrogen no? which is blooomin cold? mmmm it also has water geysers and volcanism suggesting a hot active core..
Click to expand...

Yes but as long as the pressure is high enough, it doesn't really matter how hot you go. Maybe activity deep below in the metallic core causes enormous ''pillars'' of ice to get thrusted out of the underground and into the hydrosphere, where the lower pressure causes it to instantly ''explode'' into liquid water, jetting far out into the atmosphere. At least that is how I imagine volcanic activity would look like on a planet like this.
 

Defacto

Defacto
Things said:
Speaking of weird planets, here's the least plausible one I've seen recently:

http://i.imgur.com/3L5dxmN.jpg

Rock/metal planet with surface temp of 11,196K ...
The star you see next to it is "just" 8,408K hot.
That atmospheric pressure isn't making things more reasonable, either.
Click to expand...

That planet should be glowing blue-white. Right? It's Eleven thousand degrees hot. Considering that it is hotter than its star, the heat must come from inside, which means that it is even hotter in the core.
Could the heat come from friction caused by tidal forces? It is orbiting really close to that star. I'm not sure if that is even possible, though.
 

AtheosisX

A
Ice worlds are not usually made up of water ice. That said even with a high pressure atmosphere I don't think there are any gases or liquids that would be frozen at that temparture. Technically you can call rocks and metals frozen at that temperature, but no one would. Ice has the connotation of cold, not merely the solid state of a substance.

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Rhonda said:
According to the Galactic Book of Records (https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=50952) it is

HOTTEST ICY PLANET
HIP 71526 4 WITH A SURFACE TEMPERATURE OF 2,709K - HOZZDUTCH
Click to expand...

Err...what? Rofl...
 

AtheosisX

A
FalconFly said:
A Water Geysir at 1550K and nearly 2.7 billion standard atmospheres of pressure - must be quite a show http://www.falconfly.de/img/chatt.gif
Click to expand...

2.7 billion standard atmospheres? I'm pretty sure that's more than the metallic hydrogen layer of Jupiter. Honestly I question is that's even remotely possible on a world that isn't a gas giant.

Edit: Actually that number is in the millions, not billions.

Edit 2: Looks like it's legit. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/05/070517-hot-planet.html
 
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